How to do SEO for Hospitality Businesses
If you’re in the hospitality industry, making your business stand out online in such a highly-competitive, saturated market presents a unique challenge. With industry giants such as VRBO, AirBnB, and Expedia dominating the scene, you’ll need a strategic approach in order to make your company visible to your target audience and increase the amount of business you receive through online channels. SEO can be an effective method to reach your potential guests or clients while they’re still early in the buying phase.
Today’s consumer loves doing their own research before seeking out hospitality services or planning their next trip and the first place they usually go for their research is on Search Engines such as Google. In fact, over 92% of ALL online experiences begin with a search engine. By identifying search terms your audience is using that is relevant to your business, you can optimize your website in order to improve your position for those terms. This can result in thousands of monthly visitors to your site who are actively searching for what your company has to offer.
That’s right, with SEO your audience comes to you. When an online user finds out about your business on their own accord, as opposed to through an intrusive advertisement, they are much more likely to trust your company and become a paying client. Having a robust SEO strategy is an important element of any digital marketing strategy for hospitality businesses.
Hospitality SEO Services
At Optimum7, we’ve been creating comprehensive SEO strategies for the hospitality industry in order to generate leads and increase the amount of business they receive online.
Some of our services include:
- Site Auditing
- Content Marketing
- Local SEO
- Technical SEO
…and more. Ready to start talking to someone about creating and executing an SEO strategy for your Hospitality business? Reach out below, and one of our experts will be in contact with you.
Speak to an ExpertWhat is SEO and How Does it Work?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a marketing strategy that focuses on generating web traffic to your business’s website from a relevant audience by improving your position on search engines, such as Google. By targeting search terms, or keywords, you can generate a steady incoming stream of web traffic from an audience that is actively searching for your services.
Why Search Engines?
Google is the most popular website in the world (by a large margin) and the first place people go when doing research. In fact, 92% of all web experiences begin with a search engine. But, 75% of those clicks are for results on the first page. This means, ranking on the first page is both profitable and competitive.
With SEO, you can rank for valuable keywords that will help you book guests, grow your online visibility, generate new leads, and improve sales.
When a customer finds you through SEO, they trust that they are finding your website through their own research rather than a paid advertisement. Not only do consumers trust organic results from search engines more, SEO also provides a higher ROI as you can see positive results from SEO for years to come.
How Does SEO Work?
SEO relies to a number of on-site, off-site, and technical optimizations in order to improve rankings.
Essentially, Google wants to deliver the most relevant result with the best user experience possible. The way it does this is by taking a number of factors into account, including:
- The quality of your content (Is the content high-quality, informative, and relevant?)
- The “authority” of your website (How trustworthy is your site? Do other websites refer to your site?)
- The User Experience (Is the website fast? Is it optimized for mobile devices?)
…and a number of other factors to determine Page Rank.
Overall, SEO can be a lot of work, depending on how competitive your niche and aggressive your approach.
Average Increase in Website Traffic
+97%Average Increase in Conversion Rate
+52%Monthly Total Leads Generated
3,000+We become an indispensable resource for our clients to drive traffic and leads.
3 Steps to Make an SEO Strategy for the Hospitality Industry
Creating SEO strategies for the hospitality industry is no easy task. We've broken down some of the first steps you should take when forming an SEO strategy.
1. Perform an SEO Audit on your Hospitality Site
If you’ve had a website for a few years now and haven never tried to optimize your pages for search engines, you probably have a lot of work to do.
Performing an SEO audit on your site can point out a number of things:
- Identify errors on your site such as broken links and duplicate content. These may be hurting your website’s position on search engines and user experience without you even knowing.
- Do you have analytics installed on your website? This can give you important insight and metrics further along the line.
- Show you high-opportunity pages on your website where a few optimizations could be profitable to your business.
- How to improve your current content strategy.
…and more. Before you start creating new pages, blog posts, and link building, you’ll want to make sure your site is fully optimized so you receive the full benefits from the rest of your SEO efforts.
2. Keyword Research and Content Creation
Once you’ve audited and optimized your current site, you’re ready to start pursuing new search terms that will bring in a relevant audience to your business.
Keyword research is a practice SEO specialists do that involves researching keywords that are related to your industry, profitable, and will attract an audience that may make a purchase or booking from your site.
There are 2 methods to performing keyword research:
- Competitor Research: Who is your biggest online competitor? There may be terms they’re ranking for that you may not have even considered.
- Keyword Research Tools: Tools such as Moz, Spyfu, Ahrefs, and others can be an effective way to find new keywords to pursue.
Once you have a list of keywords, you’re ready to start creating targeted pages and content. This involves creating high-quality content that isn’t “over-optimized” and doesn’t unnaturally stuff keywords into the headers and body text.
Content can be in the form of blog posts that answer frequently asked questions, or pages on your site such as “service” pages that detail the products or services you provide.
3. Track and Improve
The best time to install Google Analytics on your website is when you first built it, the second best time is right now.
Google Analytics is a tool that digital marketers use to track their audience’s behavior once they visit their site.
Analytics can give you important insights as to how people interact with your website, including:
- How do people find your website? Are they going through search engines or direct links?
- Where do people go once they’re on your site? What is the journey they take? Can you improve that funnel?
- What pages are causing people to leave your site?
…and more. With those insights you’ll know where your website needs improving and whether or not your marketing efforts are paying off!
Optimum7 has been helping businesses in the hospitality industry with SEO, digital marketing, and development for over 15 years. Reach out to one of our experts today and we’ll show you how your website can become your most important marketing asset.
Speak to an Expert